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5 - Out of the Soil

Soil (Dark Matter Biodiversity) and Societal ‘Collapses’ from Mesoamerica to Mesopotamia and Beyond

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 August 2019

By
Timothy Beach ,
Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach  and
Nicholas P. Dunning
Edited by
Partha Dasgupta ,
Peter Raven  and
Anna McIvor
Partha Dasgupta
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Peter Raven
Affiliation:
Missouri Botanical Garden
Anna McIvor
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

Much of what we can say about the ebbs and flows of ancient societies comes embedded in and directly from the soil. The soil provides evidence about its past and about the qualities it provided for ecological health and human resources. This is important to the topic of this book because the soil, or the pedosphere, is the ultimate domain of ecosystem services and holds the Earth’s highest biodiversity. In this chapter, we begin with a review of biodiversity and erosion in the underappreciated soil ecosystem and then consider societal collapses, extinctions in a sense, mainly through the lenses of geoarchaeology or archaeology using many tools of the geosciences.

Type
Chapter
Information
Biological Extinction
New Perspectives
 , pp. 138 - 174
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

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